Hale: Solving country mysteries

By Leon Hale |
July 5, 2012

WINEDALE - Hello again from the front porch of the old farmhouse in Washington County, where in the next minute or two I may get stung by a red wasp.

At this time of year, I'm obliged to share my work space here on the porch with an assortment of stinging and biting creatures, such as red wasps and yellow jackets and spiders.

And dirt dobbers, which turn out to be mud daubers in the dictionary, but where I come from, they still answer to dirt dobbers.

Dirt dobbers can sting, but their policy is that they seldom sting anything they can't pick up and fly away with.

Even so, when I'm sitting out here trying to make my verbs agree with their nouns and something goes b-z-z-z-z-t at my ear, I duck because there's no way to tell whether I'm being buzzed by a friendly dirt dobber or a red wasp, looking for somebody to pop.

So far this summer, these wasps have been extra aggressive, especially about getting in the house. They like air conditioning the same as we do. Some days, they'll flatten themselves on the outside of the window panes, pressing their abdomens against the cool glass.

And they'll lay in ambush just outside a door, so when it opens they can zip inside. Then they'll quickly hide behind a window shade, and won't come out until we have visitors from the city.

Bees? We don't have bees just now. Usually we do. Honeybees, bumblebees, various kinds. But they haven't shown up here this summer.

However, if I say to you, "What's happened to the bees? The bees are gone," somebody from East Bernard or Huntsville will reply that they've never before seen the equal of bees.

If I say we haven't seen a lightning bug here at Winedale in two years, I expect an email from Navasota or Liberty. "You want lightning bugs? We see tons of 'em every night."

Works the same way with coyotes or hoot owls or grasshoppers or whatever. So when we don't get our usual crop of butterflies or mourning doves, I figure they're just hanging out somewhere else.

Now spiders, we do have those. Of all the natural creatures I've become acquainted with in my years of working here on the front porch, spiders are my favorites. They're smart and talented and interesting.

The one I watch most often is light brown and maybe the size of a nickel. I call her the porch spider because she makes a big web out here on the porch almost every summer night.

Sometimes she suspends a beautiful web between the edge of the porch roof and a limb of an oak tree in the front yard. The distance from the roof to the limb is 15 feet. I have measured it.

The project begins with a single strand of silk, strung horizontally from the roof to the limb, at a height of 7 feet. Now, how does the spider attach this horizontal thread? She can't fly. She can't leap 15 feet.

I once supposed that she had to attach one end, go down to the ground, crawl 15 feet to the tree, go up the trunk to the limb, paying silk out of her abdomen all the way, and finally attaching the far end when she arrived at the proper height.

But no spider would do anything that inefficiently.

What she does instead, she sits on the edge of the roof and lets a light strand of silk pay out of her belly. Several feet of it. Maybe 20 feet, who knows? It waves in the breeze until its end hits an object, such as a tree limb. And there it sticks because the spider's glands have applied to it a glue-like substance, to serve that very purpose.

Now she's made the first horizontal connection. She can walk across that 15-foot tight rope, secure the ends, come back to the middle, let herself down and attach a strand to the ground.

This gives her a basic structure, on which she builds radial strands and concentric circles to complete a complex web. Pretty slick, considering that the project begins with nothing but a silk thread waving in the breeze.

Here's the next country mystery I'm trying to solve: How do ants, ground-dwelling creatures, manage to climb a huge oak tree, crawl to the end of a 35-foot limb, and drown themselves in the sugar water of the hummingbird feeder?